Jim Lutzweiler, a public policy and market development expert, is vice president of agriculture and livelihoods at the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World. He has more than 20 years of experience developing public-private partnerships to reduce food insecurity globally, and he spent a decade working and living in West and central Africa while focused on agriculture program design and implementation, market development and policy formulation.

Before joining the foundation, Lutzweiler was senior director of global public policy at PepsiCo, where he developed strategies to encourage consumer uptake of healthier food and beverage alternatives. As part of this work, he implemented a shared value partnership business model to promote sales of healthy products by driving positive consumer choice.

Prior to his position at PepsiCo, Lutzweiler served as vice president of the AARP Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit that provides people age 50 and over with programs and services related to housing, hunger, income and isolation. In this role, he focused on addressing the systemic causes of elderly hunger, devising public-private partnerships with the health care and retail grocery sectors designed to increase nutrition and reduce food insecurity among older adults.

He was also a founding member of the Root Cause Coalition, a diverse group of hospital systems, nonprofits and corporate partners dedicated to making hunger a health issue embedded within the social determinants of health.

Lutzweiler has also served in leadership roles with Joint Aid Management, World Vision and Catholic Relief Services. At Joint Aid Management, he was responsible for oversight of U.S. government grants, corporate and foundation grants, and philanthropic funding, as well as expanding school feeding programs in Ghana and Nigeria.

During his time at World Vision, he led the efforts for a unified food advocacy strategy focusing on issues of foreign aid, trade and food aid policy, with an emphasis on policy reform in recipient countries. Lutzweiler lived in West and Central Africa while at Catholic Relief Services, developing and implementing emergency response food distribution programs, supplemental feeding for vulnerable groups and agricultural recovery.

Lutzweiler is originally from New Jersey, United States, and has an Master of Arts in policy analysis from Duquesne University in policy analysis, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and philosophy from Hope College.